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Research interests
My primary field of specialization is sociolinguistics. I am currently involved in research on variation--different ways of "saying the same thing" and how and why they develop. I have also done work in the formal syntax of Dutch, the construction of sexual identities, and the construction of masculinity in an online community.
My dissertation work was on the English variable (ING) (working/workin') and how it changes our reactions to people. It was based on the Matched Guise Technique, using pairs of recordings manipulated with the computer to differ only in tokens of (ING). Other recent research used stimuli from my dissertation research to explore the impact of external information (e.g., speaker profession) on the role of (ING) and to investigate whether (or in what circumstances) one of the variant serves as a default, contributing less social information than the other. My current work reaches out towards work in psycholinguistics and social psychology, looking at how the processing of sociolinguistic variation interacts with other social and linguistic cognitive processes.
Recent Work
Expectations, meaning and variation, summarized informally here and presented at NWAV 36 as "What did you think she'd say? Expectations and sociolinguistic perception"
2007. ``Accent, (ING), and the Social Logic of Listener Perceptions". American Speech
2007. ``Methods for the study of the social
structure of linguistic variation". in BLS 32 Proceedings, Berkeley Linguistics Society.
2006. ``The Elements of Style''. with Penelope Eckert, Norma Mendoza-Denton and Emma Moore for the Half Moon Bay Style Collective. Poster presented at NWAV 35, Columbus, Ohio.
2006. ``Variation and the Listener: The contextual meanings of (ING)". in Penn Working Papers in Linguistics vol 12.2: Selected papers from NWAV 34.
2006. ``Why don't they hear what I say?'' Handout prepared for www.FairerScience.org and presented at National Science Foundation, Education and Human Resources Division
Human Resources Development Joint Annual Meeting
2005. Listener perceptions of sociolinguistic variables: The case of (ING). PhD thesis. Stanford university. (PDF, table of contents, informal summary)
2002 (a).``Sharing resources and indexing meaning in the
production of gay styles'' (with Robert Podesva and Sarah Roberts). in
Campbell-Kibler et al. 2002 (b).
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